Washington (AP) – The Trump government has taken another step on Monday to make it more difficult to find important, legally required scientific assessments of how climate change endangers the nation and its people.
Earlier this month, the official government websites that organized the authoritative, Peer-Reviewed National Climate Reviews, became dark. Such sites tell state and local authorities and the public what to expect in their backyard of a warming world and how they can best adapt. At the time, the White House said that NASA would house the reports to comply with a 1990 law that requires the reports, the space agency said it was planning to do.
But on Monday, NASA announced that it demolished those plans.
“The USGCRP (the government agency that supervises and used to organize the report) met its legal requirements by presenting its reports to the congress. NASA has no legal obligations to host the data of Globalchange.GOV,” said NASA Persa Perss Secretary in an e -mail. That does not mean data from the assessment or the government -scientific office that coordinated the work will be on NASA, she said.
On July 3, NASA explained a statement that said: “All existing reports will be hosted on the NASA website, whereby the continuity of reporting is guaranteed.”
“This document is written for the American people, paid by the taxpayers, and it contains vital information that we need to protect ourselves in a changing climate, such as the disasters that keep mounting, so tragically and clearly demonstrating,” said Texas Tech Climateist Katharine Hayhoe. She is the main scientist at the Nature Conservancy and co-author of various national climate assessments in the past.
Copies of previous reports are still being eliminated in the Library of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the latest report and the interactive atlas can be seen here.
Former Obama Witte Huis Science adviser and climate scientist John Holdren accused the administration of outright lying and long intended to censor or bury the reports.
“The new attitude is classic Trump administration -dismay,” said Holdren. “In this case, the administration offers a modest comfort to suppress the initial indignation about the closure of the Globalchange.GOV site and the disappearance of the national climate reviews. Then they will take the comfort two weeks later without apology.”
“They just don't want the public to see the carefully collected and scientifically validated information about what climate change is already doing for our farms, forests and fishing, as well as storms, floods, forest fires and coastal homes – and about how all that damage will grow in the absence of coordinated leisiness campaign in an e -mail.
That is why it is important that state and local authorities and people see these reports every day, said Holdren. He said they were written in a way that is “useful for people who have to understand what climate change is doing and with them, their loved ones, their property and their environment.”
“Trump doesn't want people to know,” Holdren wrote.
The most recent report, published in 2023, showed that climate change influences the safety, health and livelihood of people in every corner of the country, with minority communities, in particular Indians, often disproportionate risk.
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